The late Michael Crichton had an interesting contrarian streak for a popular fiction novelist. In one of his last novels, State of Fear, he stuck his thumb in the eye of the global warming/climate change “consensus” (it remains the only novel I remember reading that had footnotes).

Readers saw his contrarian streak a decade earlier, too, in Disclosure which also became a motion picture featuring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore. Dislosure hit shelves at a time when sexual harassment was taking a prominent place in news media reports about the corporate world but, in a twist, the plot centered on a Machiavellian ploy by a female executive to use harassment allegations to edge out a male counterpart.